Free LoveStar by Andri Snaer Magnason

red helicopter from a Norwegian oil rig marked Statoil. For a moment he mentally tried out his star on the helicopter with the legend below: LoveOil. He sent a short memo to the computer at iSTAR’s asset management department: Statoil/LoveOil? Nothing more was needed. The computer would investigate the question, and if it proved profitable the computer would buy the company and simultaneously print out sticky labels marked LoveOil.
    Below the helicopter hung a tarred stave church. A gift from the Norwegian state to LoveStar’s Museum of the World. The gift was thanks to the Mood Division. They had managed to convince the world that anything not on show in the Museum of the World was worthless. Further down the valley the road had been closed and waymarkers and signposts had been removed while a giant Sphinx made slow progress up it on the back of a truck. All these things were on their way north to the vaults under LavaRock, and the magnetic pull of the LoveStar theme park seemed infinite. Infinity: ∞. He drew the symbol on the paper again and again. Infinity. He owned an infinite amount. He had waited an eternity, an infinite time, for the results of the search. An infinite sum of money had gone into financing it. If it all worked out, something infinitely great would be found. He turned the paper around and drew the infinity symbol over those already drawn on the page until the paper was covered with flowers.
    LoveStar let his eyes wander over his realm. Polish welders snacked on Prince Polo crackers in one of LoveDeath’s rocket hangars; a trawler hauled a rocket up from the heaving sea; a long-haired fly specialist from the Bird and Butterfly Division sat intently measuring the density of a mosquito brain while a colleague talked into thin air, apparently painting an invisible wall. In a concert hall on the outskirts of Bangkok, fifty thousand moodmen were disco-dancing at an international incentive conference held by iSTAR’s press department. A crazy hubbub of rejoicing broke out and the moodmen flung their arms wide as if in a trance. LoveStar switched perspectives and saw what was happening. Ragnar Ö. Karlsson, former head of mood at iSTAR, was beaming at them from a giant screen and singing a duet with a stark-naked female pop singer in a live broadcast from the seventy-thousand-strong iSTAR music department conference in Moscow. LoveStar ground his teeth. There was no sign of Ragnar’s standing within iSTAR diminishing, even though he had been demoted to head of the LoveDeath Mood Division.
    LoveStar looked closer to home, watching a raven soaring on an updraft by the cliff, before passing inside the rock to where tourists were being shown to their rooms. In the inLOVE wings of the theme park, endless rows of lovers from all over the world could be seen cuddling up together inside the cold rock walls. Old people sat in rocking chairs, waiting for LoveDeath, resting their eyes on 3-D images of their childhood homes, or watching rocket after rocket shoot into space.
    LoveStar roved around the world in this manner, changing perspective from Paris to Tierra del Fuego to Bologna, Tokyo, and Kiev. Everywhere towers rose like anthills from the suburbs and loomed over the old city centers. Although the towers were built variously from steel, stone, glass, or carbon fiber, the brand was instantly recognizable. They were imitations or stylizations of LavaRock, erected where there had once been cemeteries before LoveStar had taken it upon himself to “clean them up” and free the cities once and for all from “los miserables restos de la época de descomposicion de los cadaveres de ceres humanos,” as the Mayor of Buenos Aires put it: “The pathetic remains of mankind’s age of decomposition.”
    LoveStar went nowhere near the daily running of LoveDeath. In a documentary about LoveDeath on CNN, LoveStar had said: “The satisfaction of seeing LoveDeath become a